Russell KirkTo the modern politician and planner, men are the flies of a summer, oblivious of their past, reckless of their future.
About This Quote
In a quote from the play The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde said, “To the modern politician and planner, men are the flies of a summer, oblivious of their past, reckless of their future.” In our modern world that places a heavy emphasis on planning and pre-determining the future, it is hard to imagine that these two quotes from two different centuries could ever be uttered in the same sentence. However, they both have something to say about how we view people and how we view our future. There is something so daunting about the thought of a person being in a constant state of flux. We tend to think that people who don’t have a plan for their lives, who don’t have a future in mind, are lost in time.
Some Similar Quotes
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- Politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth.
- Immer wieder behauptete Unwahrheiten werden nicht zu Wahrheiten, sondern, was schlimmer ist, zu Gewohnheiten.
- What people want, mainly, is to be told by some plausible authority that what they are already doing is right. I don't know know of a quicker way to become unpopular than to disagree.
- A people religiously right, will not long remain politically wrong.
More Quotes By Russell Kirk
- If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.
- To the modern politician and planner, men are the flies of a summer, oblivious of their past, reckless of their future.
- Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.
- Because “we human beings are imaginative by nature, we cannot choose to live by the routine of the ant-heap. If deprived of the imagery of virtue” – imaginative depictions of the truly good life – “we will seek out the imagery of vice.
- By “the Permanent Things” [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in...